Qina’a bilaun Al-Samaa (A Mask, the Colour of the Sky) by Basem Khandakji, Tanmia Publishing (Egyptian edition), Cairo, 2024, pp. 239
The novel is structured as a story within a story. It starts with the idea of writing a novel on Mary Magdalene by Noor, the novel's protagonist, who is a Palestinian youth living in a refugee camp in Ramallah, West Bank. He divides his time between notes for this imagined work and his present life
Throughout the novel, Noor refers frequently to the famous novel The Da Vinci Code. On a parallel level, he narrates his orphanage story, where Nora, his mother, died during his birth while Mahdi, his father, was detained as a resistance fighter.
Noor introduces Murad, his only friend, who was kidnapped by the occupation forces suddenly when both of them were walking in the camp alleys. Murad has always been satirical towards Noor’s preoccupation with Mary Magdalene while his brethren are subjected to detention, torture, and abuse.
Noor constantly showed filial feelings towards Murad’s mother, especially whenever he accompanies her to the bus going to Murad in his prison on a journey that takes eight hours.
Noor’s mother’s absence contributes to his near silence, while the loss of a father figure shapes his early life.
Mahdi used to be a resistance hero, making the Israeli occupation forces suffer greatly. However, he was released after being detained for five years on one condition: signing a declaration that he will not return to “violence,” that is, resistance.
To the surprise of all the camp occupants, he started to make a living by selling tea and coffee. This coincided with his comrades in arms gaining benefits and appointments within the Palestinian Authority. Afterwards, Mahdi began to gain the respect of the camp occupants.
Mahdi did not forget that his comrades in arms abandoned his wife and mother during his detention years, so he refused for Noor to receive an excellence scholarship that would offer him a free university education because it was from the Palestinian Authority.
Thus, Noor was obliged to work to save money to enrol in a university in Israel. Eventually, he graduated from the Faculty of Archaeology.
Camp residents call Noor “the American,” among other labels, suggesting he is a foreigner because of his Western appearance. On one occasion, an Israeli patrol stops a group of Palestinian workers and greets Noor in Hebrew with an Ashkenazi accent, assuming he is Jewish. From then on, he decides to learn Hebrew in that same accent, viewing it as a “spoils of war.”
While buying a second-hand leather coat, Noor discovers an Israeli identity card in the pocket belonging to a man named Ohr Shapira. In Hebrew, “Ohr” means “light”, just like “Noor” in Arabic. He keeps the card after it is forged with his photograph by Sheikh Morsi, an expert working in a Jerusalem tourism company, where Noor worked for two years.
In a moment of indiscretion, Noor, as a tour guide, suddenly kept shouting in English to a group of American tourists about the reality of a Palestinian town, which the Zionists had obliterated its Arab name and history. The company owner sacked him, and he kept hiding for a month and a half in Ramallah.
Throughout the novel, Noor used to record voice messages on his mobile phone for his novel project and imagined that Murad would hear these messages.
He decides to attend the Fulbright second season for the excavation of the Sixth Roman Legion in Tel Megiddo, Northern Israel, very close to the site which Noor chose for the setting of his Mary Magdalene novel.
Suffering from a period of identity loss, Noor regained his sense of identity through reading the books Murad recommended to him.
Then Noor/Ohr moves to the Fulbright Institute and begins to hear Ohr’s voice inside him, criticizing certain behaviour or urging him not to make a certain move. During his moments of silence, whether in his room or with the excavation group, the two voices battle with each other as an indicator of a divided self and a conflict brewing within him.
Understandably, Noor grew close to two Belgian girls in the group and ignored Ayala Sheraabi, an Aleppine Jewess, who tried very hard to become close to him, and he snubbed her. Noor did that to evade the fact that his disguise would be discovered and be imprisoned.
On the other hand, Ayala interpreted this as being a Sephardic Jewess and that the Ashkenazim always look down upon Sephardim on the basis that they were Western and the ones who established this country.
All the time, Noor quotes and compares Western books and films. Is it due to his father’s negligence in his upbringing? Consequently, Noor absorbed this culture and made it his intellectual foundation.
Is his choosing the Mary Magdalene plot considered a form of escape from the harsh reality that drove his father to utter silence after his role in the struggle?
In Noor’s imagined novel, Mary Magdalene is portrayed through Western religious and literary references as a figure close to Jesus whose presence provokes jealousy among the disciples, especially Peter. Gnostic traditions are used to present her as a spiritual figure who unites masculine and feminine qualities.
Noor/Ohr later meets Samaa Ismael, the only Palestinian in the excavation group. She remains distant from him and strongly asserts her Palestinian and religious identity. She observes fasting even within a secular Jewish and Christian environment.
On asking her for her opinion on the Holocaust, she was adamant to state that she viewed it from a humanitarian perspective, not a Zionist one, and not as a justification for the world Jews to occupy Palestine and forcibly displace its people from it.
He later discovers she has a tattoo reading “Haifa 1948.” When he eventually tells her he is Arab, she reacts angrily, calling him insane, a normalizer, or an Israeli security agent in disguise.
Following unrest in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, the excavation committee ends its work, citing security concerns and the fragility of the situation inside Israel.
The novel ends with Noor leaving the Mishmar HaEmek settlement. Samaa approaches him in her car, and he gets in after removing a Star of David necklace and tearing up the Israeli identity card.
In an internal dialogue between Noor and Ohr, Noor tells Ohr he holds no grudge against him, but explains that living under an Israeli identity allows him access to information and movement in lands he believes were taken from Palestinians. He also says he intends to use this identity to free himself from it.
Samaa, whose name means “sky” and also appears in the novel’s title, functions as both a symbolic and real presence. She is the only character who consistently reminds Noor of his identity and faith, acting as an anchor. In one of Noor’s visions, she appears as an embodiment of Mary Magdalene.
Eventually, he abandons the novel project and throws his mobile phone away. The mirror in his room breaks (as if it were Greater Israel). The novelist relied heavily and symbolically on the mirror in the conflict between him and Ohr: “The mirror is the equation, thus I want to break the mirror!”
Having the ID of an Israeli citizen is a very brilliant idea, but he did not make good use of it by opting to write a novel on Mary Magdalene as a motive to break through an Israeli settlement. This weak justification was met with sharp doubt and ridicule from all those who were close to Noor.
Khandakji was very convincing in offering details of the archaeological and excavation efforts.
Mary Magdalene’s line in the novel was a burden, for even if it constituted a motive for Noor to engage in this risky adventure, it felt forced, especially the absorption in details regarding Jesus Christ’s relationship with Mary Magdalene and the disciples’ envy.
Basem Khandakji, who spent 21 years in Israeli prisons, was released last October as part of a prisoner exchange deal during a Gaza ceasefire. He has previously published two novels and several poetry collections.
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